I caught the number fifteen bus from the stop around the corner from the bar (thanks to Ziebi's extensive collection of bus schedules), and got to work twenty minutes early. They pulled me aside for a random X-ray at the second checkpoint, and I managed not to show my relief when they developed the picture and said I could go. I'd worried that Surrethia's skeleton might not quite look right in Ziebi's body, but they didn't seem to notice. They considerately shielded my fake gonads with a lead apron, which meant I didn't have to tighten the connection between my spine and pelvis -- I'd loosened it up a little to let me match Ziebi's height, knowing that most X-rays wouldn't show that part of the skeleton.
When I walked in to Block S, I gave a big yawn.
"Rough day?" Rukharria asked me. She was Ziebi's fellow guard on the night shift.
"Didn't get enough sleep. And not for a fun reason, either; I'd almost gotten to sleep when the neighbor's cat started yowling..."
I feigned bleariness, to discourage unnecessary conversation that might blow my cover. We had orders to keep two prisoners awake all night; I glanced at the order sheet and said, "I'll take the one in eighteen."
"Sure," she said, looking pleased. Eighteen was a solitary cell; if it wasn't Themia's cell, then going back and forth to eighteen every hour should give me a chance to slip into Themia's cell and deal with her at some point.
No, I found out an hour later, the prisoner in eighteen wasn't Themia. There were four solitary cells on the back hall of Block S, all out of sight and earshot of the open cells that were filled with two or three prisoners each. I didn't want to check each of them one by one; too much chance of Rukharria finding out. So on my next break after walking the rounds, I looked in the file drawer that held the information on various prisoners.
The prisoners in sixteen and twenty weren't Themia; even if she'd given the interrogators a fake name, and managed to stick to it, the incarceration dates were wrong. The file for the prisoner in cell seventeen was missing. I knew what that meant. The screams I'd been hearing intermittently from the interrogation room down the hall were Themia's. And I might have kidnapped Ziebi and risked revealing my identity as a lunar for nothing, if they kept her there all night.
But a little before midnight the interrogators emerged from the room leading a listless, hollow-eyed Themia.
"We're done with this one for now," said the higher-ranking one, a redhead whom most human men would have thought beautiful. "But don't let her get more than a few hours' sleep. Wake her up a couple of hours before morning shift and keep her up."
"Aww, not another one!" Rukharria complained.
"I'll take care of her," I said; "it'll be convenient, she's right next to my other one."
"You're a peach," she said. "I'll cover for you next time."
I took the keys for the solitary cells and led the interrogators and Themia back to cell seventeen. We locked her in, and just before the door closed I saw her give me a look that would have made Edward writhe in agony; Surrethia didn't feel too good about it either.
The interrogators had me unlock the prisoner in cell twenty, and interrogated her until the end of the shift.
I kept going into cell eighteen every hour or so, but since she was in solitary, and nobody could see what I was doing in there, or hear me shouting at her -- or not shouting -- I let her get some sleep. It wasn't much, not enough to satisfy Edward's conscience, but it was all I could do until the organization had its people in place for a prison break.
A couple of hours after moonrise, I left cell eighteen, after watching the old woman sleep for a few moments, and unlocked cell seventeen. I slipped in quietly and closed the door behind me.
Themia was sound asleep on her cot, one hand drawn up toward her face, drooling a little. I thought for a moment about killing her in her sleep -- I could crush her throat with lunar strength, I could reshape my hands to make an airtight cover on her nose and mouth. But I needed to get out of here without being suspected of killing her, and she deserved an explanation. I shook her shoulder gently until she blinked.
"All right," she said, sitting up, "I'm awake now. You can go." Then she glanced at me suspiciously. "Why were you so gentle this time? Last night you yelled at me and slapped me every time I dozed off..."
"Don't look a gift horse in the mouth," I said. It was an English idiom, and it sounded faintly ridiculous in Omreshi; she looked at me curiously and then her eyes got wide.
"I'm Edward," I said in English.
"Eduarr?" she asked, and then, trying harder to match the English sound: "Edward? How...?"
I replied in Omreshi -- no sense twisting my tongue when there was no chance of eavesdroppers, as there might have been in the bar. "After Irrush got killed, Bill reappeared in Gerald's living room..." I explained how we'd come in to help them and tell them how they could get home, and how Khonu had escaped the night of the raid and stayed free since. She nodded.
"I'd hoped he'd get away. I might have gotten away too, if..." she choked. "I know now that he's okay, and I wouldn't have wanted him to go through even an hour of what I've suffered, but... I've still been feeling guilty about shooting Bill."
"What?"
"The guards had shot him in the back," she said. "He could hardly walk and probably wouldn't live many hours; there was no way we could take him with us... and I couldn't leave him there for them to suck out his brain and do God knows what with it. I shot him in the head, but I hesitated too long, and I got caught not long afterward."
I was silent for a moment. "You don't necessarily need to tell him. He was in so much agony and confusion from the first shot, he didn't know you were the one that gave the coup de grace. I won't tell, anyway."
"Thanks... So I guess you're here to get me out?"
"Back to Gerald's house," I said. "I can't get you out of the prison otherwise."
"Oh... Well, it can't hurt any worse than what they've been doing to me here."
"Less, I hope." I took the powder in its wax-paper package from my pocket. "This isn't the fastest poison, but I can't afford to kill you outright. The day shift might find your body before I get clear of the prison. It'll probably kill you before they have a chance to interrogate you much more, though... With any luck they'll think it's a heart attack from the stress of questioning and they won't even do an autopsy."
"Why does that matter?" she asked.
"It probably doesn't. I just need to get away from here before you die so I can tell Khonu and Biansurru I got you out."
"All right..." She reached for the poison but I held up a hand.
"We don't know for sure that suicide will get you out of here. Everybody we know of got back to Earth by being murdered." She flinched at the word "murdered" and I regretted my word choice. "Killed by an outside agency, anyway. So I'm going to feed you this."
"Okay." I dissolved the powder in the big mug of water the day shift guards had left her, and held it up to her lips, forcing her to drink. She didn't spill much, and there was enough poison to kill three people.
"So that's it," she said, after spluttering for a few moments. "I'm dying?"
"Going home," I said.
"Kim's going home," she said, "but Themia is going to a strange place that sounds kind of scary."
"Scarier than here?"
"It's just a matter of time before the government of America is as bad as the one here. And they've got much better surveillance technology than Omruthia does; when they really start using it unashamedly, they'll be scarier than these people. Maybe all those little kids and actors disappearing is going to be an excuse for another big power grab, like after 9/11."
"Maybe we can do something about that," I said. "I'd better go."
"Tell Bill I'll expect to see him back at Gerald's house as soon as he gets off work."
"It might take us another couple of hours to wrap things up here, but hopefully not too long. Goodbye."
-----
She was asleep again when I returned an hour later; I let her sleep. I woke her gently a few minutes before the end of my shift.
"I'm about to leave," I said. "How are you feeling?"
"Awful," she said. "Dizzy and lightheaded, and... I can't feel my toes."
"Shouldn't be too much longer, then. Try not to conk out before the day shift gets here, okay?"
"All right, smartass. When you get home I expect you to dish about what it was like being a woman for... however long I've been in here..." She closed her eyes, swayed back and forth for a moment, and fell back on her cot. I let myself out.
-----
I let out a sigh of relief when I plunked down in an empty seat on the number eleven bus. The day shift guard hadn't raised a ruckus when she checked on Themia, and Ziebi obviously hadn't escaped from her bonds and called the police or the prison yet. A few minutes more and I would be safe. I rode past Ziebi's apartment building, noting a reassuring lack of police cars in front, and continued to the end of the line, the central intercity bus station. I went inside the station to the ladies' room; once in a stall, after I'd done my business, I changed from Ziebi back into Surrethia. Ziebi's clothes no longer quite fit me; I considered taking off her bra, adding muscles to my breasts to make them self-supporting, and disappearing my nipples, but it could be dangerous to get caught like that at moonset. I wound up loosening the straps, but leaving the bra in place, and loosening the girdle. Fortunately the prison guard uniform was loosely tailored, and my feet were about her size, so I didn't need any other adjustments.
Once I was all put back together, I caught the number nine bus to Biansurru's house. I unlocked it with my key and let myself in.
Biansurru was waiting in the sitting room with Khonu; we'd given Khonu a key to the house so he could hide there until we got off work.
"Who's that?" Khonu asked, looking a little nervous.
"It's me, Eduarr," I said. "Didn't Biansurru tell you I'm a lunar?"
He looked from one to the other of us. "He kind of forgot to mention that detail."
"Well, the face I was wearing when we met yesterday evening was a disguise I was using to infiltrate the cell block where Themia's being held."
"Did you see her?" Biansurru asked breathlessly.
"I saw her, and I gave her the stuff. She's probably back in Gerald's house by now, or if not now, then within another hour or two at most."
"Hmm... She'll probably be alone. Gerald and Karen would be on their way to work by this time."
"If time flows at the same rate... It was roughly an hour for us between you disappearing and coming back; was that about how long it was for you?"
"About that; I don't know."
"Anyway, let's give Kim some time to get dressed before we show up," I said. "It will give us more time to talk about what we're going to do."
"Maybe we should draw straws," Khonu said. "Short straw kills the other two and then themselves?"
"I'm not sure killing ourselves will work," I said, and I explained what I'd said to Themia, and how I'd forced her to drink the poison.
"I hope that works," Biansurru said. "I mean, I hope whatever being is doing this to us considers that a killing instead of, I don't know, an assisted suicide."
"We don't know that suicide won't work," I said. "Probably it would. But let's play it safe. And let's not assume too much. Themia didn't have much choice -- if I didn't give her that poison, they'd keep torturing her and eventually pop her brain into an oil drill or something. But we do. Do we all want to go back?"
"Why wouldn't we?" Khonu said. "This place is worse than my parents' most harrowing stories about growing up in Hungary under communism. I want out of here."
"All right. Biansurru?" I tried to act casual, but I felt a deep dread. I knew what he'd say -- it had been clear to me over the last few days that he thought of himself more as Bill than as Biansurru; and as Bill, he cared a lot more for his girlfriend, recovering from the shock of her death and getting dressed in an empty house, than for me, his adoptive sister.
"I'm going back. Part of me wants to stay and bring down this evil system, like we've been trying to do for so long... but realistically, it's not going to happen in our lifetimes, and if I stay here and participate in the big prison break, I'll probably wind up in an interrogation room and then in a brain-box."
I nodded sadly. "If you're both going, then... I guess I'll go too."
"You don't want to, though?" Khonu asked.
"Not really. I guess it's different for you two... you've got just a few decades of memories from either life, and you might feel more like Sandor one minute and more like Khonu the next. But I've got centuries of memories as Surrethia, overwhelming the mere three decades as Edward."
"I'd kind of gathered that," Biansurru -- Bill -- said. "I just didn't want to admit it. But if you'd rather stay here, despite the fact that being a lunar is a capital crime and you have to hide who you are... well, we'd understand. We'll explain to Kim and Gerald and Karen, and anybody else you want us to pass messages to."
"No, I'll come back with you. Not at the same time, I mean, but a little later. I can kill you two here in the house easily enough -- we've got chloroform left over, and I can make it painless. But then I'll need somebody to kill me. That's not hard for a lunar, I just need to blow my cover somewhere nice and public, and presto! instant lynch mob."
Biansurru and Khonu looked appalled. "I wish there was another way," Biansurru said, "but I can't think of any."
"Well, there's suicide by cop. Just depends on when and where I blow my cover. But yeah, I pretty much have to let them burn me alive to get out of here."
"I see why you're not in a hurry to leave," Khonu said.
I shrugged. "I'll be along after a while, probably a few hours after you get back. You guys ready?"
Biansurru took a deep breath. "I guess so."
I hugged him long and hard, and he didn't resist; he squeezed me back this time. Over his shoulder I saw Khonu looking away from us, embarrassed.
I fetched the chloroform, and told Khonu and Biansurru to sit in the bathtub before I knocked them out.
"What?" Khonu asked, bewildered. "Why?"
"So the blood will go down the drain, and the landlord's charwoman won't have so much work to do to make the place habitable for the next renter."
"Oh... That is surprisingly considerate, under the circumstances."
They barely managed to squeeze into the tub -- Biansurru was a big man, and the tub wasn't a comfortable fit for him, even alone. I chloroformed them, and waited a minute to be sure they were well under. Then I hauled Biansurru out of the tub -- I had other plans for him, and they didn't involve getting his corpse all bloody -- and slit Khonu's throat.
"He's going home," I muttered to myself. "Right now he's flopping around nude on Gerald's living room floor. Hopefully he'll manage to get dressed before Kim walks in -- she's probably in the kitchen or den or somewhere..."
I took Biansurru into the living room and laid him on the sofa. Then I returned to the bathroom, took off my clothes, and cut off most of Khonu's bloody clothes to make the next step easier. I only had a few more hours till moonset; enough time, but not a lot extra. I ran the shower for a few moments to wash the worst of the blood down the drain; then I turned it off and carefully stopped up the tub. Next, I let my human form liquefy -- I'd been gradually breaking up and dissolving my skeleton ever since the bus station restroom, in preparation for this -- and flowed into the tub, engulfing Khonu's body.
It took me half an hour to digest him. Then I started fissioning.
I finished with just half an hour to spare until moonset. As soon as I'd formed a pair of eyes, I looked at my sister, who was still looking a little amorphous around the edges; her toes weren't differentiated from her feet yet, her breasts didn't have nipples, and she didn't have much of a nose or ears yet. I wasn't much farther along.
When we'd gotten ourselves looking more human, we gave each other a long look.
"We can't both be Surrethia," we said simultaneously.
After a pause, we said "Heads I stay;" -- this time she was a fraction of a second ahead of me. I nodded, and we went into the bedroom where she picked up a coin from the bureau. I watched as she tossed it high; it fell on the bedspread... heads up.
"Heads you stay," I agreed, and shapeshifted back into Ziebi with barely five minutes until moonset. With the deadline so close, I had to hurry it, and even though I didn't have a skeleton, it still hurt.
Then we got dressed -- I put on Ziebi's borrowed clothes -- and I helped her carry Biansurru to the car. Then I said goodbye, and went to catch a bus. Surrethia would drive Biansurru out to the lake to drown, giving him another dose of chloroform on the way to keep him under. She would walk to the nearest bus stop, and report him missing a day or two later; when his abandoned car was found near the lake, it would be dragged for his body, and he'd be ruled a suicide, or possibly a murder by one of the resistance movements that hated Erru Serrezikhal and everyone involved with it. She could go on with her life, keep working at the prison and help with the breakout whenever the organization got all its pieces into place. Even though I was about to go to a country with better technology and a much less oppressive government, I envied her. How much of myself could I retain when I became Edward? Was there even room in his human brain for my three hundred years of memories?
-----
I nodded a greeting to a couple of Ziebi's neighbors as I got in the lift to go up to her apartment. I let myself in and went to the bathroom to check on her.
She was asleep, but her pulse and breathing were good. I left her alone and laid down to take a nap.
I was awakened, I'm not sure how much later, by the sound of the police kicking in the door. Aha. They must have figured out I'd poisoned Themia. I sat up and waited for a moment; then, to make it look good, I scrambled for the window and fumbled with the latches. They caught up with me before I got it open, and ordered me to halt; I turned around.
"What's wrong, officers?" I asked. Just then there came a muffled moaning from the bathroom. I laughed. (This was kind of fun in a perverse way, knowing nothing I could do would make this worse, and that it would be over soon in any case.)
One of the officers called out: "There's another one in here! Looks just like her, but she's bound and gagged."
"I think we've got ourselves a lunar," the officer in charge said with relish.
They dragged me out the door and down the stairs, giving me a few whacks on the head with their batons and pistol-butts for good measure. It didn't hurt nearly as much as changing from Surrethia to Ziebi in a mere five minutes; my brains weren't in my head, but all over my body. Once they had me out in the courtyard, one of them took out a matchbook and struck a match.
"Stand back, guys," he warned, and touched it to my fingers. When my hand went up like a torch, the others yelled, and one said:
"That's a lunar, all right!"
Now this hurt worse than any hurried transformation. But I had just presence of mind enough to grapple the officer who'd held the match to me; I might not be able to take him with me (the fire had already spread from my arm to my torso, and now my head; I was blinded), but I could give him some bad burns... I lost feeling in the arm that had started burning first, and with the other arm that had just started burning I felt my grip on the officer loosen. He pulled away from me, and for I'm not sure how long -- seconds, minutes -- I felt nothing but pain.
-----
Then I was falling, and I hit something soft with a whump. When I stopped screaming, realizing that I didn't hurt anymore, I picked myself up and looked around.
I was lying, nude, on a bare mattress that was spread out next to Gerald and Karen's dining room table, where the chairs had been when Bill and I left.
"Um, guys? Where are my clothes?"
Sandor called out from the den, "They're hanging on the back of one of the chairs." I looked around, and there they were.
A minute later Bill called, "Are you decent yet?"
"I've got my pants on, anyway." He, Kim and Sandor emerged from the den and looked at me.
"The prodigal returns," Kim said. "Thank you for getting me out of that damned place."
"You're welcome," I said, pulling on my shirt.
"And me," Sandor said. "I don't see how I could have rescued her on my own. I wouldn't have known how to get back here; even if I could get her out of prison we'd have been stuck in Gerald's stupid dystopia for the rest of our lives..."
"What are friends for?"
But I knew what friends weren't for. I'd be closer with Bill -- and Sandor and Kim -- after this than before. But I'd never have the kind of relationship with him I'd had with Biansurru for the last twenty years, first as his friend, then as his lover, then as his sister. By the time I got used to being Edward again, I probably wouldn't even want it.
Back home (I was still thinking of Omruthia that way), Surrethia would be grieving over him. Probably less than we'd grieved over the loss of our other human friends in centuries past, since she'd know he wasn't really dead, just gone to an arguably better place -- but she'd still grieve.
And I'd be grieving over the loss of my life as Surrethia, and over my lost relationship with Biansurru. It hadn't been the same since that sudden infusion of Bill and Edward's memories, anyway. But Edward's friends and relatives wouldn't be grieving over him, as so many were over the people who'd vanished three days ago and hadn't come back.
"Hey, Edward...?" Bill said to me later, when Kim had gone to the restroom and Sandor was in the kitchen making another pot of coffee.
"Yes?"
"It would be weird to keep thinking of you as my sister, you know. But if you want to be my brother..."
I didn't say anything; I just hugged him. Brothers can do that.
Ough. Love this concept